Fenoglio Angela, Georgieff Michael K, Elison Jed T
Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, 51 East River Parkway, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA.
Department of Pediatrics, Division of Pediatric Neonatology, University of Minnesota, 6th Floor East Building, MB630, 2450 Riverside Ave, Minneapolis, MN, 55454, USA.
J Neurodev Disord. 2017 Jul 19;9(1):27. doi: 10.1186/s11689-017-9206-9.
Preterm birth is associated with an increased risk of adverse neurologic, psychiatric, and cognitive outcomes. The brain circuits involved in processing social information are critical to all of these domains, but little work has been done to examine whether and how these circuits may be especially sensitive to prematurity. This paper contains a brief summary of some of the cognitive, psychiatric, and social outcomes associated with prematurity, followed by a description of findings from the modest body of research into social-cognitive development in infants and children born preterm. Next, findings from studies of structural and functional brain development in infants born preterm are reviewed, with an eye toward the distinctive role of the brain circuits implicated in social functioning. The goal of this review is to investigate the extent to which the putative "social brain" may have particular developmental susceptibilities to the insults associated with preterm birth, and the role of early social-cognitive development in later neurodevelopmental outcomes. Much work has been done to characterize neurobehavioral outcomes in the preterm population, but future research must incorporate both brain and behavioral measures to identify early biomarkers linked to later emerging social-cognitive clinical impairment in order to guide effective, targeted intervention.
早产与神经、精神和认知方面不良后果的风险增加有关。处理社会信息所涉及的脑回路对所有这些领域都至关重要，但几乎没有研究探讨这些回路是否以及如何对早产特别敏感。本文简要总结了与早产相关的一些认知、精神和社会后果，随后描述了对早产婴儿和儿童社会认知发展的少量研究结果。接下来，回顾了早产婴儿脑结构和功能发育研究的结果，着眼于涉及社会功能的脑回路的独特作用。本综述的目的是研究假定的“社会脑”在多大程度上可能对与早产相关的损害具有特殊的发育易感性，以及早期社会认知发展在后期神经发育结果中的作用。已经开展了大量工作来描述早产人群的神经行为结果，但未来的研究必须结合脑和行为测量方法，以识别与后期出现的社会认知临床损害相关的早期生物标志物，从而指导有效的针对性干预。
